Conservation Photography | Fifty Years in the Field — Jess Lee
You Can't Protect What You've Never Seen
Fifty years of conservation photography — grizzlies before the endangered list, wild wolves before reintroduction, trumpeter swans on frozen rivers, and the country nobody was fighting for.
I never wanted the credit. I wanted the pictures to do the work.
That has been the whole method for fifty years, and it started with rivers — eastern Idaho in the 1970s, president of the Upper Snake River Chapter of Trout Unlimited, learning that a photograph made the argument better than I could. Everything after that has been a version of the same job. Find the thing that is about to be lost. Bring back proof it is worth keeping.
A bear nobody could photograph
In the 1970s, the grizzly was headed for the endangered species list, and there were almost no usable photographs of one in the lower 48. That was the problem stated plainly: there were not enough bears left to photograph. Months could go by without a sighting.
The bears that mattered were not on the coastal rivers, where they are fat and easy and where everyone was already working. They were up in the mountains — thin country, hard weather, animals that want nothing to do with a person. That is where a grizzly still lives the way a lower-48 grizzly lived. It took a few years of going back, and most of what I had to spend.
National Geographic ran the results. Everything since came out of that.
A wolf the public had never actually seen
When reintroduction was being fought over, the country was being asked to decide the fate of an animal almost nobody had laid eyes on. There was next to no film of wild wolves. The wolves in the books and on the calendars were captive animals behind fences, and everyone in the business knew it.
Game-farm work was so routine that National Geographic assumed it. When they chose one of my wolf images for a cover, they came back and asked how the animal could be proven wild. I told them to call Bob Landis — he was the only other person out there that day, running cinema while I shot stills. I don't know whether they ever made the call. Bob didn't even know the picture was up for a cover. It was a wild wolf, in conditions I have not seen again.
A wolf through a spotting scope is television. You see it, and somewhere in your mind you can feel it, but you are watching from behind glass and the animal owes you nothing.
Stay in an animal's presence longer than a passing moment and something else happens. The wolf knows you are there. It decides whether to trust you. You keep a respectful distance and, if you have earned it, you are permitted to stay — the wolf goes back to its business and stops accounting for you. That permission is the whole thing. It cannot be rushed and it cannot be bought.
I have never tried to photograph wolves extremely close. A head filling the frame can be stunning and still tell you nothing about what a wolf is. But given enough days, there are moments when the eyes lock onto yours and hold, and you understand that you may not be able to see into a wolf's soul — the wolf can see into yours.
Getting that meant not working the way the others worked. The standard was to set up in Lamar Valley and shoot at distance. I went where being present was possible instead, and paid for it in time. Two months once without a frame. Then two days with twenty-five wolves.
James Halfpenny wrote Yellowstone Wolves in the Wild, and his publisher was ready to kill the book — there was not enough wild wolf material in existence to illustrate it. I sent in photographs. He wrote back that he could go ahead. Over half the images in the first printing were mine, and the book is still known for the fact that not one wolf in it is captive.
A white bird against a white background
The trumpeter swan came within a few hundred birds of being gone entirely. What was left in the Rockies wintered on the stretches of river that stay open when everything around them freezes, and for years I worked with a researcher trying to keep them.
The work was done at night. You catch a swan on a frozen river in the dark, draw blood, check the bird over, put a band on it so somebody can follow where it goes, and let it back into the cold. It is not romantic. It is how anyone knows anything about whether a population is recovering.
Then there were the mornings — more than a hundred of them below freezing, trying to photograph a white bird against a white background, which is very close to the hardest thing you can ask of a camera. You stand alone in the dark and the cold and wait for a sun that comes up through air so full of suspended ice crystals that it glitters, and some mornings the light is so strange that no photograph is possible at all. You go back the next day.
There are more trumpeter swans now.
Country with no defenders
Yosemite and the Tetons have people willing to fight for them because everyone has seen them. The Wyoming Range, Wyoming's Red Desert, the Malpais in New Mexico, the desert country of southern Arizona — those had almost nobody, because almost nobody knew they were there.
They are some of the strangest and most alive country on the continent. The Red Desert holds wild horses and habitat that exists nowhere else, and it was being overgrazed, over-drilled, and mined by people who had never had to look at it. Through the 1980s I worked with conservation organizations on that country, and the photographs were the only real weapon any of us had.
Desert & Canyon → · Wild Horses →
The ones that are nearly gone
Jaguars pulled me to South America after years of hunting the few that slip into Arizona. The big cats pulled me to Africa. Then the super tuskers — bulls carrying ivory of a size that has very nearly left the earth. Finding them took weeks and months of learning where they were and how they lived, before a single frame worth keeping.
There is a black leopard in Kenya called Giza. I had wanted to photograph a black leopard my whole life and was told, repeatedly, that this one could not be done. We found Craig and the last of the great tuskers first, then turned north and spent a week with her, day and night. She was wonderful to us.
Jaguars → · African Wildlife → · Elephants →
Still at it
The job has not changed. Find it. Photograph it well enough that someone who will never stand there can feel what it is. Hope that is enough to keep it. There is more to life than economic gain, and some things have to be held for the people coming after us — trite as that sounds, fifty years has only made it look more true.
Every print on this site came out of that work.
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